Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet

Abstract

ative Theory and Geography Meet, elec-tronic media scholar, Marie-Laure Ryan and geographers Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu argue that space performs significant and often unrecognized functions in narrative discourse. The authors trace the rhetorical work of space across media, including literary classics, Google Maps, city streets, and museums. By bringing together geography's attention to space with nar-rative scholarship illuminating the rhetorical power of stories, the authors advance an interdis-ciplinary perspective that broadens our understandings of both what space does and how narrative works. Although the authors are not rhetoricians and do not consistently engage rhe-torical scholarship or vocabularies, their work productively complements our growing conver-sation on the rhetorical possibilities of space and place. The book's paramount tasks are to identify and conceptualize multiple functions of space: space is not simply setting; it produces symbolic and emotional meaning, organizes plots, directs patterns of reader engagement, and orients readers effectively to both the spaces within stories and those we encounter and inhabit.